Collective Effervescence with Eliza McLamb at Bar Le Ritz

Years ago in American high school, there was a pretty girl in my year whose friends were friends with my friends; she played guitar and worked at the perfume store next to the kratom cafe I frequented. Fast forward seven years and that girl is a touring musician selling out venues to screaming fans and I’m getting guest-listed for her show. Eliza McLamb’s debut album Going Through It, released on her birthday at the beginning of this year, is emotionally raw and wrecked. This album is ripe with dialectical emotions, straddling the pain of being alone to tumultuous relationships, big city living and finding commercial success with the conflictual need for backroads and deep woods, and loving so hard and hurting so much. Her band reflects this, with silences holding the audience’s breath to walls of sound with distortion pedals and screaming lyrics. With the clear acoustic guitars overlaid on fuzzed-out solos and hard-hitting drums McLamb’s music sounds like an indie gothic with an urgency to be known while remaining sexily mysterious. 

    Eliza’s vocals fully convey the depths of feeling put into her songs, both lyrically and sonically. When she sings you feel it all go deep inside of you, pulling out feelings you didn’t even know you had. When the music surrounds you it's as if you are standing there, as her, growing older in front of the frozen creek, or forcing your Corolla down backroads and over potholes. It feels strange to me, like I have a special connection to her music, though I’m sure all the young girls in the audience feel the same, but I am intimately aware of the landscape we came from. Eliza Mclamb’s and my hometown is a Southern liberal enclave, with woods surrounding every neighborhood and school, and creeks that meander through and into the open escape of rolling pasture fields. I hear a significant appreciation for the beauty of the natural world that encompasses us in Eliza’s lyrics, especially in her new single ‘God Take Me Out of LA’. The opening lines lament the lack of nature and weather in LA, her deep desire to get out of the fast-paced concrete jungles she worked so hard to get into, and the pain of visiting home and seeing what you’ve missed: the overflowing creeks, the fallen trees, your family and the scattering of friends who stayed. I feel I understand what she means, running off to a big city that feels like it hates you, feeling stuck, undecided, and that nagging and disappointing urge to move back home, to our creeks and our woods. 

    Eliza’s concert was really sweet, she was quiet when she spoke but it felt meaningful when she did. She interacted with the audience as if we were friends, asking for our honest reaction to her new, unreleased songs, encouraging us to sing along, and sharing her feelings about her tour coming to a close. Halfway through the show, she told us she felt annoyed that the venue smelled like chocolate cake as if someone was pranking her with delicious treats until she realized it was her chocolate cake-scented makeup getting sweated off in the hot red stage lights. The band was very tight, they all played their instruments extremely well, even the horrifically cracked cymbal, and expertly navigated each of their pedalboards. They adapted to awkward moments of tangled cables and guitar straps disconnecting with friendly giggles while continuing to play. During her second to last song, ‘Lena Grove’, Eliza introduced it as her own version of an encore, so we know that when she leaves the stage it's really over and she's not coming back. She donned her acoustic guitar as her band left the stage, swooned out the heart-wrenching lyrics, and slowly her bandmates came back on stage and picked up the quieter song into a roaring wave. They played one more song and left the stage for good. That is a fantastic way to do an encore. 

    It was really cool and inspiring to see someone from high school become a successful touring musician, especially someone who still follows my defunct private Instagram account I used to overshare my teenage antics. It feels almost invasive to listen to her music, like I have some level of intimate knowledge about what she's singing about, despite us never being close. Oh, the things teenagers will post on social media.

Jasper Cobb is the host of The Castle, on air every Friday at 1 PM